*"IF A LION COULD TALK"*

Steven A. M. *Burns*
Dalhousie University
Halifax, Canada


ABSTRACT

This paper treats Wittgenstein's aphorism, "If a lion could talk,
we could not understand him," not as absurd, nor as a comment
about sensation reports, as various commentators have explained
it. Rather, it is argued that an examination of its context
(Section xi of Part II of PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS) demands an
account first of percepion (and of objectivity and subjectivity in
the case of 'seeing-as'), and then of meaning (which is not itself
an experience, but which otherwise is richly analogous to 'seeing-
as'). The concept of 'social space' is then employed to explain
the lion's meaning and our (mis-)understanding of him.


PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS, Part II, Section xi, in some senses
the most sustained passage of argument in that most sustained of
books, is a wonderful bestiary. The section begins, of course,
with a rabbit-duck, and we later meet a goose with teeth in its
wings, a cow serving as mouth for a rose, and a hypocritical dog.
Most characteristic, however, is the more mundane talking lion. He
has been only shallowly served by commentators, and passages in
more recently published work, CULTURE AND VALUE and REMARKS ON THE
PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY, make it clear that he deserves further
consideration. He illustrates central issues in Wittgenstein's
thought about perception as well as about language. This essay
briefly surveys some "lion" literature, before developing an
interpretation of the whole of Section xi.


I "IF A LION COULD TALK WE COULD NOT UNDERSTAND HIM."*1*

Jenny Teichman has chided, what if the lion said, "Ludwig, I'm
going to eat you all up"?*2* No doubt we could tell from the
lion's tone of voice that he wasn't reciting a bed-time story to
his infants? In any event, Teichman's joke does not touch the main
point; Wittgenstein has just written, "If I see someone writhing
in pain with evident cause I do not think; all the same, his
feelings are hidden from me" (p. 223). I suppose that if the lion
toyed with me as a cat does with a mouse, I might hope that his
intentions were merely playful. But his intention to eat me, if
expressed in a language which I understood, would be as unhidden
from me as the pain in Wittgenstein's example. The peculiar
difficulties which Wittgenstein is calling to our attention have
to do with what has some claim to be considered HIDDEN. Of course,
if we are thinking simply of the lion's speaking an unknown
language, then it may be that we could not understand a thing that
he said. But Wittgenstein is concerned about more interesting
circumstances, and only some of the things which the lion says
will pose relevant problems.

The remark about the lion has been called an "absurd aphorism" by
John King-Farlow.*3* He considers it a false dogma of linguistic
empiricism that only creatures very like ourselves can be
conceived to speak a language. Is it impossible that we understand
the lion's speech? There seems to be no LOGICAL impossibility; we
can conceive, or at least imagine, that beings very unlike us
might speak like us. There might, in the extreme case, even be
things innately capable of a language, who speak without learning
how, and who require no community of language users in which to
grow up. King-Farlow's fable along these lines, however, is not
convincing. He imagines trees who count and report on visiting
crows. Each tree announces the presence or absence of crows, and
announces how many there are in its area. If we can learn to
follow the speech of these trees, we should have less trouble
understanding the lions. The trees, alas, never speak to or
respond to other trees, or to anyone else. Their motives for
speaking are impenetrable. They are no more language users than
are the turnstiles which count and report the number of customers
entering the local Canadian Tire store. King-Farlow's attack,
then, leaves the lion unscathed.

A less likely, but more persuasive, reading of the aphorism is
given by Jay Rosenberg.*4* His lion is a broadcaster at an
American football game. Whether we can understand him or not
depends on whether he reports accurately the mayhem which we can
see on our television screens. But of course this lion has learned
our language and enough of our "sporting" practices to have some
sense of "players" and "game". Rosenberg, convinced that our
problem with this lion cannot be Wittgenstein's problem, turns to
questioning the lion's reports, in English, of his inner states.
Now we must confront a new difficulty; we lack the appropriate
television sets. Can we tell if he's really hungry, or merely
teasing? Does he give evidence which we can understand of
truthfulness, of sincerity? Here, perhaps, we see why we "cannot
find our feet" with the lion. Rosenberg searches one page back for
Wittgenstein's remark on truthfulness: "The importance of the true
confession...resides...in the special consequences which can be
drawn from a confession whose truth is guaranteed by the special
criteria of truthfulness" (p. 222). He is right to say that we
must LIVE WITH the lion long enough to know him sufficiently well
to understand him, but he has reworded the aphorism, "If a lion
could speak of HIMSELF, we could not understand him."

"The question of truth is the question of trust", says
Rosenberg.*5* If, in fact, this were to settle the issue of the
aphorism, then we should expect no further problems with the lion;
unfortunately, his speaking our language does not eliminate all
but our questions about his sincerity. We may be confident of his
sincerity, and read his gestures fluently, yet fail to understand
why he says what he does. This is true not only of "the games
which do NOT unfold before our very eyes",*6* but also of those
which do. So if Rosenberg's lion does speak our language, and does
confidently describe the football game, but makes it sound like a
religious gathering, we cannot dismiss the problem with such ease.
We should conclude that the aphorism is neither silly, nor absurd,
nor true only of speech about inner states. In order to deal
properly with Wittgenstein's lion we must look to the wider
context in which the remark is situated.


II ENGLISH WOMEN

The proper context of the talking lion is the whole of
INVESTIGATIONS II, Sec. xi. It may be sketched as follows: The
concept of "inner picture" is misleading (p. 196), and there is a
sense in which significant things are HIDDEN from us not because
they are out of sight but because, although we see them clearly,
we fail to recognize them (or some aspect of them) (p. 197); it is
in this latter sense rather than in the former that privacy and
incomprehensibility in the thought and speech of others are to be
understood. Given this context, what is at issue is not ways in
which unlikely beings may be imagined to have a language. The lion
is granted a language; the question is whether we could understand
him even so. Now put aside for the moment the surrounding forty
pages and consider just the immediate context: we find that
Wittgenstein is still writing about knowing what someone else is
thinking or feeling, and about the remark "what is INTERNAL is
hidden from us", but it is not only the internal which seems to be
hidden. Sometimes people are themselves enigmas to us: "We learn
this when we come into a strange country with entirely strange
traditions; and, what is more, even given a mastery of the
country's language. We do not UNDERSTAND the people. (And not
because of not knowing what they are saying to themselves.) We
cannot find our feet with them." (p. 223) Clearly there is more
here than has met Rosenberg's eye.

It is against this background that we must read some of
Wittgenstein's remarks in CULTURE AND VALUE. These miscellaneous
remarks have been extracted from his philosophical manuscripts,
but have been classed by the editor as (sometimes personal)
asides, parables or illustrations which bear only indirectly on
the philosophical work. Nonetheless, many of them are of real
philosophical usefulness. Half of the material dates from the
period after the completion of Part One of the INVESTIGATIONS, and
so is of particular relevance to the section we are now
discussing. Consider this example: "It is important for our view
of things that someone may feel concerning certain people that
their inner life will always be a mystery to him. That he will
never understand them. (Englishwomen in the eyes of
Europeans.)"*7* First, we do notice that it is the Englishwomen's
inner life which baffles the foreigners, so that Rosenberg's
turning us toward the inner seems to have turned us in the right
direction. But usually our problems about sincerity are resolved
precisely by hearing said aloud the very things which the person
was saying to herself but keeping from us. Wittgenstein has ruled
out exactly this. We may want to describe our persistent
bafflement as if we could not understand the motives of the person
whose relations with us are perfectly sincere. We may, even, think
that what is at stake here are the criteria of sincerity itself.
If, for instance, the Englishwomen gave every appearance of taking
as marks of sincerity utterances which in the Europeans' eyes can
only be hypocritical, what then? Even after learning that a woman
is saying what she intends, and is speaking truthfully, our
Europeans may be at a loss to understand what she can then mean by
sincerity, or by intimacy or by friendship, by reticence or by
politeness. They cannot find their feet with her.

If the problem is not solved by an appeal to sincerity, neither is
it solved by an appeal to privacy. The puzzlement is not caused by
the Englishwoman's being unable to tell us about her own inner
life. We do not, for instance, have the problem because she can
speak of her inner life only in a logically-private language; nor
is it because she alone has a sort of inverted moral spectrum,
undetectable because although her experiences of sincerity and
hypocrisy are the reverse of ours this does not show itself in any
differences in behaviour. She is, after all, an Englishwoman; she
shares with her class, or her culture or generation, some ways of
coping with other people which seem right enough to them, but
which unsettle the foreigner. She is not an isolated case.

There are other puzzling phrases in the remark about Englishwomen.
Why does Wittgenstein say that this is "important for our view of
things"? It may be because it shows the importance of what we
cannot say. Wittgenstein once wrote that there were two parts to
the TRACTATUS, the part which was written and the more important
part which was not written because he had shown that it could not
be.*8* His respect for what cannot be said and his concommitant
respect for the different moral centres of other people is
reflected in this passage. But it is likely that "our view" refers
more immediately to his preoccupations in the 1940s. A form of
life plays a crucial role in giving significance to the deeds
which have troubled our Europeans. What seems right to an
Englishwoman has its roots in certain practices of those with whom
she has spent her life. It is here, in what is neither private
experience nor public language, that we must look for further
help. Finally, why must the Englishwoman ALWAYS remain a mystery?
Does the "always" have the force of "necessarily"? Certainly not.
Often people do come to understand foreigners, or adopt a new
culture. But a sensitive person "may feel" that he will never
understand, even if, like Wittgenstein, he is a very gifted
linguist. The "always" is the always of its being true (at least
for most adults) that no amount of immersion in a new language
will enable one to lose all trace of foreign accent. As long as I
live I shall ALWAYS....

There is, then, a tension here between private experience and
public language. This tension is the subject of the whole of
Section xi, and represents a later development and reworking of
what is standardly-known from the "anti-private-language-argument"
of Part One. Any understanding of the lion will be inadequate
which depends on an unrevised distinction between inner and outer.
Superficially, Section xi divides into two very distinct parts:
first is the discussion of seeing aspects (pp. 193-214); second
the discussion of experiencing meaning (pp. 214-229). I shall
discuss seeing-as and then meaning.


III SEEING-AS

The argument of INVESTIGATIONS II, Section xi, begins with the
distinction between two ways of seeing--seeing and "seeing-as"--
and the discussion continues to be concerned with experience and
perception until there is an abrupt change at the sentence: "The
importance of this concept [that of "aspect-blindness"] lies in
the connexion between the concepts of 'seeing an aspect' and
'experiencing the meaning of a word'" (p. 214). The second half of
the section is about meaning and understanding. It is tempting to
construe the relation between these topics, perception and
meaning, in this way: the epistemology is primary and the
philosophy of language dependent upon it. This is the sort of
philosophical temptation to which Wittgenstein tried not to give
in. I am thinking here, very generally, of the perennial desire of
philosophers to discover THE correct starting place for systematic
philosophical thought. Michael Dummett takes an extreme view in
his important work on Frege: "The theory of meaning is the
fundamental part of philosophy which underlies all others.... A
correct general account of meaning, a model for what the
understanding of an expression consists in,...is the foundation of
all philosophy, and not epistemology as Descartes misled us into
believing. Frege's greatness consists, in the first place, in his
having perceived this. We can, therefore, date a whole epoch in
philosophy as beginning with the work of Frege, just as we can do
with Descartes."*9*

But Wittgenstein does not set out to settle the questions in one
area in order to be able to settle those in the other. He is not a
foundationalist about language, or about epistemology, or anything
else. On a view such as Dummett's, the mature Wittgenstein's
criticism of his own and Frege's work must be seen as a dispute
between realist and operationalist theories of meaning, and as a
dispute which at the same time places beyond dispute the view that
philosophy has foundations. This, however, is contrary to
Wittgenstein's own insistence that the prospect of any such theory
is chimerical (cf., e.g., INVESTIGATIONS I, Sec. 65 and Sec. 81).
There is no single place from which all philosophy begins, and
likewise no single place where all questions come to their natural
end.

Wittgenstein's questions about perception are not related to his
questions about meaning as foundation to superstructure, nor are
the former intended to serve as the model according to which the
latter may best be understood. There are deep similarities, and
the two topics are set side by side so that we might appreciate
the intimacy and complexity of the relationship. We should see the
varying ways in which they have privacy, "given-ness" and
interpretation in common. There are analogies between the way the
same object can be seen, but seen differently (seen as a rabbit,
or as a duck), and the way in which a sentence can be spoken
again, but differently meant. Wittgenstein explores these inter-
twinings.

In the first part of the section many different expressions are
used to characterize the distinction between seeing and seeing-as:
seeing an object clearly / seeing it under another aspect;
seeing / interpreting (p. 193);
having an impression / organizing the impression (p. 196);
seeing / failing to recognize (p. 197);
looking / plus thinking (pp. 197, 204, 211);
seeing / plus imagination (p. 202);
data / and construction (p. 213).

There are others. When we ask what has differed from the first to
the second experience in these pairs, we may wish to say that the
object has remained the same but our subjective attitude to it has
changed. Can we say that? Wittgenstein tries more than once to say
so: "I describe the alteration like a perception; quite as if the
object had altered before my eyes" (p. 195). "The expression in
one's voice and gestures is the same as if the object had altered
and had ended by BECOMING this or that" (p. 206). Although there
is the important caveat, "many of our concepts CROSS here", the
general observation is that the difference between seeing and
seeing-as is not a difference inescapably hidden, not confined to
a shift in inner picture; the shift is equally a change in the
object. "Outer/inner" is a misleading dichotomy. Only those who
are trapped by Cartesian certainties regarding this dichotomy are
in a position to insist that the object cannot REALLY have
changed, but that the alteration MUST be mental only.

The second sense of "seeing" is a "modified concept of SENSATION",
which can be differentiated from the first, unmodified notion
because the substratum of this second kind of experience "is the
mastery of a technique" (pp. 208-9). This is a logical condition
of having such an experience. The sort of technique which is a
condition of this distinction in experience is illustrated by the
difference between being able to reproduce a musical theme, and
being able to express one's understanding of it by whistling it
with the correct expression. This claim is quite distinct from the
Anti-Private Language Argument of Part I of the INVESTIGATIONS,
which addressed itself to, among other things, the privacy of
experiences by showing the role played by shared natural
expressions of a sensation in learning the appropriate concept.
Experiences of the MODIFIED sort are logically connected not with
NATURAL expressions but with techniques which must be MASTERED.
Differences in experience of this kind go together with "fine
shades of behaviour", such as changes in the expression in one's
voice and gestures, as well as with changed descriptions.

What is of key importance is that this feature of the second sense
of "seeing" is shared with meaning and understanding. A thought,
too, is connected with the possibility of its expression, and
normally that will not be natural but will depend on a learned
practice. It was this which King-Farlow meant to expose as
contingent by imagining that his trees speak instinctively. It may
be imaginable that they acquire the language without learning, and
with no need for trial and error or instruction, but it is at
least dubious that other features of mastery can be abandoned;
consider features like susceptibility to and recognition of error,
appreciation of differences between doing a passable job and
getting it just right, the cultivation of skill, and concern with
what counts as applying the technique to slightly dissimilar
cases. King-Farlow's trees do none of these things. Excluding
these from language drastically impoverishes that concept, but it
would be grotesque to include them in our concept of instinctual
behaviour.


IV MEANING/UNDERSTANDING-AS

The discussion of meaning in the second half of section xi is, of
course, indebted to the conclusions about seeing-as, but not in a
simple way. The shift is built around the phenomenon called
"aspect-blindness". Consider, for example, failure to recognize a
familiar face, inability to see likenesses, and the inability to
see a Gestalt psychologist's drawing as figure and ground (as more
than lines on a sheet of paper). Now Wittgenstein asks, "What
would you be missing if you did not EXPERIENCE the meaning of a
word?" (p. 214) The implication is that it would be like not
seeing the aspects of the duck-rabbit, and that the difference
between seeing a sentence as a string of words and understanding
the sentence, is a matter of having the appropriate second sort of
experience: seeing it as meaningful.

However natural this conclusion about the connection between
"seeing-as" and "understanding" may appear, to put it this way is
to put it wrongly. First we must acknowledge that there are ways
in which the one can be a powerful analogy for the other. Mastery
of technique certainly underlies understanding as well as
perceiving: parroting differs from speaking by being independent
both of the ability to use a phrase in a variety of plausible
situations, and of the ability flexibly to use components of the
phrase in other phrases. Again, just as seeing an object clearly
may allow us to sketch it or to re-identify it with accuracy
though we are unable to see its particular likeness to something
else, so hearing a foreign language clearly may permit us to
transcribe it accurately though we do not understand a word of
what is meant. The analogy also prospers when we consider cases in
which we repeat a word and the meaning seems strangely gone from
it, or when we play at using the wrong word in place of the right
one, and though we understand well enough, it feels odd. These
feelings are similar to the sense of something's being missing
when we can no longer see a puzzle-drawing in a way previously
available to us; it is an experience or a feeling which
characterizes the absence of an aspect or a meaning to which we
are suddenly blind. But if these similarities make up one main
theme of the passage on meaning, another is the rejection of the
thought that meaning is an experience of either of the types
distinguished. "I often do not have ANY experience of it in the
course of talking.... Yet we continue to speak of MEANING what we
say" (p. 216). "Meaning is as little an experience as
intending.... Thought is not articulated, does not "accompany"
speech" (p. 217). "Meaning is not a process which accompanies a
word" (p. 218).*10*

These two themes, that experience bears an analogical relation to
meaning, and that meaning is not an experience, tend to the same
end: the vindication of the initial idea of the entire section,
that "the concept of 'inner picture' is misleading" (p. 196). So,
"silent 'internal' speech is not a half-hidden phenomenon which is
as it were seen through a veil. It is not hidden AT ALL..." (p.
220) The analogy with the second "seeing" contributes to this
result by showing in what way we can mis-see or mis-understand
something which is yet quite openly presented to us. The claim
that meaning is not an experience makes its contribution
indirectly. The arguments for this conclusion include both
convincing dismissals ("There are important accompanying phenomena
of talking which are often missing when one talks without
thinking, and this is characteristic of talking without thinking.
But THEY are not the thinking" (p. 218)), and powerful alternative
cases ("That we FIND the word that was on the tip of our tongue
(what would it be like if we never did?) is a criterion of that
remark. NOT an expression of an experience" (p. 219)). This
perspicuous example shows that it is not what is "inner" which
constitutes the phenomenon of having a word on the tip of the
tongue. That phenomenon would be essentially different were it not
connected necessarily with (sometimes) finding the word that was
missing.

The inference to be drawn about meaning and understanding is that
these are not given (in the sense that sense-data were once
thought to be given), but are constituted through public criteria
drawn mainly from the "mastery" involved in their expression. (A
thought is complex, but not a complex of its component terms.) In
order that this be so, the expressions must play common roles in
the life of the persons thinking and speaking; "what has to be
accepted, the given, is--so one could say--FORMS OF LIFE" (p.
226). For "sense" to make sense we must presume widespread
agreement in judgements among the speakers in a linguistic
community, for without extensive concurrence about what is true
and false, the roles of particular utterances would be so
disparate as to defy in principle any attempt to find in them the
required criteria.


V META-LIONS

If we return to Wittgenstein's lion we can now appreciate the
dimensions of the problem which he poses. We are granted that he
has a language. Although he has experiences which we do not have,
we share his language and to some extent his meanings. It is,
however, very difficult to share them. He has mastered a
technique, and is skilled in the use of his language. But although
we may have learned to speak his language and to translate it into
our own, his having a language will not have turned him into the
friendly beast of fairy tales. He will not greet us heartily, give
avuncular advice, inquire after our relatives or ask us to help
him interpret a road map. What sort of conversation would you
expect to have with a lion in his natural habitat? (We can gain
some appreciation of the difficulties and limitations involved by
considering the work of field zoologists who devote years to
living in close proximity to particular groups of animals in their
natural state. Their application of anthropological methods to the
study of animals gives us some idea of the complexities involved
here.*11*) What the lion will have mastered is ways of expressing
things the significance of which is so closely bound up with a
thoroughly foreign way of life that the shared practices and
common agreements needed for normal understanding are not
immediately available to us. They would take years to build up.

This is a very important kind of failure to understand. It is
undoubtedly the most common kind, also. it extends to
misunderstandings between sexes, as when a man is unable
sufficiently to understand what pregnancy is like for his wife. It
extends to inter-generational 'communication gaps', where what
could restore understanding between children and parents would be
a substantially shared 'life-style'. It includes much political
misunderstanding, and failures to understand people of different
classes or different cultures ("I cannot understand why they
refuse to speak English when they know it better than I do
French.") We might also include many moral and religious
misunderstandings. The notorious attempt by David Hume to make
chastity comprehensible as a utilitarian virtue would be amusing
were it tongue-in-cheek; as it is, it shows all too clearly how
incapable he is of understanding people who do see it as a
virtue.*12* Now these are not extra-linguistic cases which we can
set aside with the remark: We can understand what is said; it is
only the motives for saying it which make no sense to us. The
problems are sometimes linguistic ones. We hear clearly what is
said, but we interpret it wrongly, we take it the wrong way, or we
do not know how to respond. Wittgenstein had in mind difficulties
of the same sort when he wrote: "In a conversation: One person
throws a ball; the other does not know: whether he is supposed to
throw it back, or throw it to a third person, or leave it on the
ground, or pick it up and put it in his pocket, etc." (CULTURE AND
VALUE, p. 74.)

It might be helpful to put this in terms of familiar semiotic
distinctions. These failures are pragmatic ones, stemming from
unfamiliarity with the psychological, sociological and historical
context of the speaking or writing in question. Semantic and
syntactic difficulties, on the other hand, give rise to the less
common kinds of linguistic misunderstanding. Semantic ones occur
when one or more terms are unfamiliar, as when slang or technical
jargon are used. Syntactic problems usually arise when the
language is too complicated (a child trying to understand a B.B.C.
news broadcast), or when it is incoherent (an adult trying to
understand the grammarless news broadcast under certain other
auspices). There are other kinds of misunderstanding, notable
those due to not hearing clearly what has been said (because of
accent, mumble, distance, static, inattention, etc.). But given
that we hear clearly, pragmatic problems are of the greatest
importance. In our present context this is especially true, for we
are discussing one of Wittgenstein's attempts to show that in the
philosophy of language it is an error to think that syntax and
semantics are prior to pragmatics, and that pragmatics, in turn,
can be treated as superstructural fluctuations around the
established basis of the former. It is rather the case, he argues,
that we often find in pragmatic considerations the grounds which
make semantic and syntactic distinctions possible. It is in the
practices of the speakers that we find the conditions which make
intelligible the semantic and syntactic concepts such as "rule"
and "refer". This, of course, is a repudiation of his early
position on the relations among these aspects of language.

The talking lion illustrates our finding someone else
unfathomable. It is worth repeating that we are not thinking of a
priori limitations. Peter Hacker, whose concern in his early
commentary on Wittgenstein is with a different aspect of the
passage under discussion, says correctly that a thought is hidden
or private if it is not revealed. "But it is no longer 'private'
if it is not kept secret... (INVESTIGATIONS II, p. 222). In
neither case is anything a priori opaque or private, nor is there
any metaphysical boundary which sets the limits of possible human
knowledge at the portals of other minds."*13* Now I have been
defending the view that some problems of misunderstanding, among
them the most significant ones for philosophy of language, depend
on the non-communicants' not sharing forms of life. It is a
constant temptation to think that there are metaphysical
boundaries here, too, that forms of life might be so different
that not even the most elementary things can be shared, and that
it could be logically impossible to translate a thought from the
one language into the other. (A similar picture is the Quinean one
of languages based on radically different conceptual schemes and
thus systematically untranslatable. It is sometimes imagined that
the two languages be for all practical purposes translatable, but
that there be in principle undetectable mistranslations, due to
the mis-fit between conceptual schemes.) I believe that such
worries are incoherent, but whatever their interest these
metaphysical limits of intelligibility are not our present
concern. The problems of understanding beings whose presumptions
are radically different from our own are acute, but they are not
insuperable. The limits of what can be understood from one
language to another are limits in practice, but not in what is
ordinarily considered logic.

This is put in proper perspective in a discussion now several
decades old. One such misunderstanding was admitted by Alasdair
MacIntyre, and helpfully explored by Peter Winch in "Understanding
a Primitive Society".*14* This paper, which was sometimes
curiously misread as claiming that there is no possibility of
mutual intelligibility between peoples who live radically
different forms of life, deals specifically with ways of achieving
understanding in the face of such difficulties. MacIntyre's
problem was that he could not understand the males of a certain
society who say that they believe that their souls are embodied in
a ceremonial object, in fact a piece of wood which they carry with
them, and which they so value that if it is lost they annoint
themselves as though for burial. MacIntyre means that he would be
mad if he believed what is implied, and that he thinks anyone who
has such beliefs equally mad. Such a man can have no notions of
what is reasonable, what evidence amounts to, what is perfectly
obvious fact, and so on. You could not carry on coherent dialogue
with such a person. All this in spite of the fact that we know
perfectly well how the man uses his sentence, when he applies the
word "soul", what he does under particular circumstances. There is
no mystery about the syntax and semantics; a formal statement of
the conditions for the use of the terms will not make MacIntyre
say, "Ah, now I understand what he is talking about." Winch helps
the person in MacIntyre's position by examining something
appropriately similar which does make sense in MacIntyre's own
form of life. His example is a love token, say an engagement ring
which is also a family heirloom and which is invested with such
significance that valuing it is deeply symbolic of loving the
giver. The loss of such a ring, betraying apparent carelessness,
may well provoke remorse and gestures of mortification.

Winch goes on to consider what he calls "limiting notions" and
general procedures for trying to relieve such failures to
understand. For present purposes it is enough to say that this
case exemplifies the sort of misunderstanding and aid to
understanding which are of central importance to Wittgenstein's
view of the philosophy of language.
   If a lion COULD talk it is this sort of problem, many times
multiplied, which we should have in trying to understand what he
meant.


VI WHAT IT TAKES TO MAKE A LION

I wish to conclude by arguing that the talking lion is in a very
special way a social object. Wittgenstein's lion is not a Turing-
machine, for instance. We are not here trying to decide whether a
machine is conscious and intelligent. We will surely treat the
lion as conscious from the time of first meeting. (We may suspect
him of being something other than he appears, perhaps a human in
costume, even a machine in lion's clothing, but that is a
different sort of worry.)

Let us assume that we are relatively mature intelligences and
sophisticated to some extent about our own natures. What may we
think about this lion-object which is now presented to us? That it
is an extended object with some spatio-temporal continuity,
certainly. That it is animate, constantly moving, responding to
its surroundings in ways apparently aimed at self-preservation.
That it speaks? Here I begin to need to refer to others of its
linguistic community. The lion's speech does not present us with a
problem of "radical translation", nor, of course, is it in a
logically private language; I am, after all, assuming that I have
learned its language. It is not speech which is entirely directed
to objective treatment of its surroundings; we have already
included in the story grounds for assuming that the lion
converses, that he shows some sort of interest in what we say and
think, that he responds to what he understands of our speech. We
now think of him as having this important dimension to his life.

Raimond Gaita has claimed that "an animal cannot curse the day it
was born, not because it does not remember the day it was born,
but because its life doesn't have the kind of unity which is the
(logical) object of such a curse.... That shows itself in the fact
that an animal is not a proper subject for a biography--it doesn't
have that sort of LIFE, and the kind of individuality that goes
with it."*15* Aesop in his fables does not provide counter-
examples to this claim. We might think that in BORN FREE Joy
Adamson does, that she writes the biography of the lioness, Elsa.
I am inclined to think, however, that this sort of writing is a
form of fiction rather than biography proper. Certainly the
biography of Elsa cannot contain an account of her cursing the day
she was born. The lion with whom we were conversing, however, is a
being whom we treat as though this were a possibility.

This new dimension is one which is inevitably social. It would not
be comprehensible that a being have the kind of individuality of
which Gaita writes without its being conscious of its difference
from others. It must care about its own distinctness in order that
its curses be motivated, and for that care to have any content the
being must have a grasp of what it is that it is distinct from,
what other beings are like, how they differ from him, how he
appears to them, and how he may think of himself as if from the
point-of-view of others with similar capabilities.

This dimension, this social space which we assume our lion to
occupy, is suggested by Wittgenstein's remark: "Suppose we were to
meet people who all had the same facial features: that would be
enough for us not to know where we were with them".*16* Here, as
in the case of the remark about Englishwomen in the eyes of
Europeans, we are not concerned with the simple chauvinisms of
which we may be reminded. Rather, the question is what are we to
think of these people who DO look identical. Do they look
indistinguishable to each other as well as to us? Does it not
matter to them which person it is to whom they are addressing
themselves? Is everyone greeted the same way and are there no
distinctions between friend and stranger? What can we then make of
the role of individuality in their lives? Could they write
biographies or curse their lives? Perhaps they individuate
themselves by some other clues, by body shape or by labels. If so,
we can get a grip on their individualness again, but at peculiar
cost. Now we must imagine that they cannot greet a friend by
returning smile for smile, but must interrupt the gesture by
scanning, say, each other's shirt front for indications of his or
her identity. And if each face crinkles in the same way when
laughing, how are we to understand infatuation?

These questions help to show how important this social dimension
is. It is the presupposition of our taking the lion to be a
speaking being that he occupies some such dimension, and it is the
source of our difficulties in understanding him that we are not
familiar with the specific shape which this dimension takes in his
life. Should this presupposition be defeated (for it may, of
course, turn out to be false that he is this kind of social
being), then we must radically re-evaluate the claims that the
lion was speaking, and that HE was speaking to US.*17*


NOTES

*1*
Ludwig Wittgenstein, PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS, 2nd ed., tr.
G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), p. 223. I shall in what
follows refer to the INVESTIGATIONS simply by placing section or
page numbers in parentheses in the text.

*2*
I have this only at second hand, from my colleague, Roland
Puccetti.

*3*
John King-Farlow, "Two Dogmas of Linguistic Empiricism", DIALOGUE,
XI (1972), pp. 325-336.

*4*
Jay F. Rosenberg, "Speaking Lions", CANADIAN JOURNAL OF
PHILOSOPHY, VII (1977), pp. 155-160.

*5*
Rosenberg, p. 160.

*6*
Rosenberg, p. 156.

*7*
L. Wittgenstein, CULTURE AND VALUE, ed., G.H. von Wright, tr. P.
Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 74. The remark is taken from
manuscripts written in 1948. It is precisely the philosophical
context of such remarks which is omitted from this very
interesting collection, but we can tell that the lions and the
Englishwomen belong together. Compare, too, Ludwig Wittgenstein,
REMARKS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. II, eds. von Wright
and Nyman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980): "'These men had nothing
human about them' Why?--We could not possibly make ourselves
understood to them. Not even as we can to a dog. We could not find
our feet with them." (Sec. 700. Cf. Sec. 561.)

*8*
In a letter to Ludwig Ficker, collected in WITTGENSTEIN: SOURCES
AND PERSPECTIVES, ed. C. Grant Luckhardt (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1979), p. 93.

*9*
Michael Dummett, FREGE: PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE (London: Duckworth,
1973), p. 669.

*10*
A very helpful discussion of the "inner" and the "hidden" is found
in Norman Malcolm, NOTHING IS HIDDEN (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986),
especially chapters 9 and 10.

*11*
Jane Goodall is one of the pioneers in this field. See THROUGH A
WINDOW: MY THIRTY YEARS WITH THE CHIMPANZEES OF GOMBE (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1990).

*12*
David Hume, A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE, ed., L.A. Selby-Bigge
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), Book III: Part II: Section xii.
See discussions of chastity in Richard Norman, "On Seeing Things
Differently", RADICAL PHILOSOPHY, I (1972), pp. 6-13, and Steven
Burns, "The Humean Female", DIALOGUE, XV (1976), pp. 415-424.

*13*
P.M.S. Hacker, INSIGHT AND ILLUSION (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1972), pp. 245-6.

*14*
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY, I (1964). Reprinted in P. Winch,
ETHICS AND ACTION (London: Routledge, 1972).

*15*
Raimond Gaita, "Moral Luck", PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY, XXXIII
(1983), 288-296, pp. 290-1.

*16*
CULTURE AND VALUE, p. 75. See, too, REMARKS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF
PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. II, Sec. 611, where he considers beings with "the
same bodies and the same facial features." Ray Monk has noticed
the importance of this. Discussing the apprehension of fear, he
says: "There is no reason to think that a general theory of fear
would be much help here (still less a general theory of language).
Far more to the point would be an alert and observant sensitivity
to people's faces, voices and situations." LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN:
THE DUTY OF GENIUS (London: Jonathan Cape/Vintage, 1991), pp. 547-
8.

*17*
I have read papers on this topic to various groups, including the
Dalhousie Philosophy Seminar, the Atlantic Philosophical
Association, and the Canadian Philosophical Association. I am
indebted to many discussants, especially to Neil MacGill, Serge
Morin, Béla Szabados and Kai Nielsen.